Not in Love by Ali Hazelwood

“Believe me, I know.”

His sincerity made her finally look up from her knees. “It’s embarrassing,” she admitted.

“What is?”

“Maya’s . . . great. The first night we met, you said you two used to not get along, but clearly you worked through your issues. Meanwhile, I’d get a restraining order for my brother if I weren’t a fucking wimp.”

He nodded. “Maya is great, and we now have a good relationship that I wouldn’t change for anything. But . . .” He swallowed. “Want a story?”

“Depends. Is it terrible?”

His laugh was low. “It’s the most terrible of all of them, Rue.” It wasn’t an exaggeration. Her nod was solemn.

“I don’t even know where to start. How about—Maya is great now, but when she was fifteen, she slashed the tires of my car because I told her she couldn’t go to a midnight screening of some shitty horror movie on a school night.” He winced at the memory. “And when I grounded her to punish her, she slashed the new set, too.”

Rue’s eyes widened. And then deviated from their routine: she asked a question. “Who gave you the right to tell your sister what she could and couldn’t do?”

“Are you siding with her?”

“No.” She sniffled. “Maybe?”

He chuckled. “I got custody of her when she was eleven. The court gave me the right. Literally.”

“And your parents?”

“They died one year apart from each other. Unrelated. My mom first, acute leukemia. Then Dad—car accident.”

“How old were you?”

“Twenty-five.”

“And you were her only remaining relative?”

“There are some scattered uncles and second cousins, but none here in Austin, and none she knew well. I was an adult and her brother. There was no question in anyone’s mind that I should be the one taking care of her—not even in mine.”

“If someone asked me to take care of an eleven-year-old, I wouldn’t know where to start,” she mused.

“Same here. Maya was a toddler when I moved out for college. I didn’t get along with my parents, so I rarely went back home and hardly saw her.”

“Is that why the last thing you told your mom . . . ?”

“About being a shitty mother?” He sighed. “My dad was the kind of disciplinarian who’d ground you for days for a perceived eye roll, and I was . . . a shithead. His approach did not work for me. Constant fights, ultimatums, threats—them trying to get me to be less wild. Me being ever more wild, out of spite. All that teenage shit. And my mom, she deferred to him in everything, so.” He shrugged. “If I could talk to them now, adult to adult, maybe we’d get over that stuff. But I moved to Minnesota to play hockey. Took all sorts of part-time jobs. I’d go back home once a year for a couple of days, tops. Then grad school started, and you know how busy it gets. I was in the same city as my family. I could have visited more, but home was a place where I’d been miserable for three-quarters of my life, and there was so much baggage on both our ends. The last time I saw my mom was on my birthday. They invited me over for dinner. The conversation devolved into the usual recriminations. A few weeks later my mother died.” He’d had a decade to work through the kinks of these regrets, and they were still tangled in his head. Always would be. As it was, he couldn’t stand his fucking birthday. “Then my dad, fourteen months later. And I was my sister’s guardian.”

Rue’s eyes held neither pity nor condemnation. “Was Maya . . .” She shook her head. “Were you okay?”

Had anyone ever asked him that before? Everyone’s focus had been on Maya, rightfully so. Eli’s heart thudded, and he covered it with a laugh. “I was definitely not okay. I was freaking the fuck out. I didn’t know Maya at all. I had no money, I’d just been kicked out of my doctoral program, and my parents’ mortgage still needed to be paid. And Maya . . . initially, she was just mourning. Later, the grief turned into anger, and she had to take it out on someone. The two available options were me and herself, and she spared neither.” He swallowed. “I don’t think she would deny that she was kind of an asshole. Then again, I was severely underqualified.”

Rue laughed, bubbly and wet, and even in the midst of recounting his worst story, he couldn’t believe how rare and lovely it sounded. I like you when you laugh. I like you when you’re serious. I like you all the damn time.

“Did it get better?”

“Not for years. Before she left for college, it was slammed doors and screaming matches and acting out. In hindsight, I can’t imagine how devastating it must have been, to have a brother who’s fundamentally a stranger tell you what you should do. When she left for college, she was done with me. I was half-convinced I’d never see her again. By then Harkness was doing well and I could afford to send her to school wherever she wanted. You know where she picked?”

“East Coast?”

“Scotland. She went all the way to fucking Scotland, just to get away from me.”

She tried to hide her smile. “I hear it’s very beautiful.”

“I wouldn’t know. I was never invited to visit.”

Rue snorted a laugh. He had to force himself to stop staring. “She did come back, though.”